Big Tech clashes on AI consciousness

Good morning, AI enthusiasts. Just as AI models are getting eerily good at seeming human, Microsoft’s AI chief is pumping the brakes with an urgent warning: stop treating them like they’re alive.

Mustafa Suleyman’s recent essay takes direct aim at “Seemingly Conscious AI” systems, calling research into model welfare “dangerous” — and showing tech’s biggest players are deeply divided on certainly one of AI’s hardest philosophical questions.

In today’s AI rundown:

• Microsoft exec warns about ‘seemingly conscious’ AI

• Bill Gates backs Alzheimer’s AI challenge

• Create and edit Canva designs with ChatGPT

• Microsoft Excel gets an AI upgrade

• 4 recent AI tools, community workflows, and more

P.S. — Need to be featured in our Community Workflow section? Tell us how you’re using AI in your work here.

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

MUSTAFA SULEYMAN

🧠 Microsoft exec warns about ‘seemingly conscious’ AI

The Rundown: Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman published an essay warning about “Seemingly Conscious AI” that may mimic and persuade users they’re sentient and deserve protections, saying they pose a risk each to society and AI development.

The main points:

• Suleyman argues SCAI can already be built with current tech, simulating traits like memory, personality, and subjective experiences.

• He highlighted rising cases of users experiencing “AI psychosis,” saying AI could soon have humans advocating for model welfare and AI rights.

• Suleyman also called the study of model welfare “each premature and admittedly dangerous”, saying the moral considerations will result in much more delusions.

• The essay urged firms to avoid marketing AI as conscious and construct AI “for people, to not be an individual.”

Why it matters: Suleyman is taking a robust stance against AI consciousness, a contrast to Anthropic’s extensive study of model welfare. But we’re in uncharted waters, and with science still uncertain about what consciousness even is, this seems like closing off necessary questions before we have even properly asked them.

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AI & MEDICAL RESEARCH

🔬 Bill Gates backs Alzheimer’s AI challenge

The Rundown: Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates is funding the Alzheimer’s Insights AI Prize, a $1M competition to develop AI agents that may autonomously analyze a long time of Alzheimer’s research data and speed up discoveries.

The main points:

• The competition is searching for AI agents that autonomously plan, reason, and act to “speed up breakthrough discoveries” from a long time of worldwide patient data.

• Gates Ventures is funding the prize through the Alzheimer’s Disease Data Initiative, with the winning tool to be made freely available to scientists.

• The competition is open to a variety of contestants, including each individual AI engineers and massive tech labs, with applications opening this week.

Why it matters: Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis has said he envisions “curing all disease” with AI in the following decade, and Gates is betting that AI agents may help speed up Alzheimer’s research without delay. The free release requirement also ensures that discoveries profit global research as a substitute of being locked behind corporate partitions.

AI TRAINING

🎨 Create and edit Canva designs with ChatGPT

The Rundown: On this tutorial, you’ll learn tips on how to use ChatGPT’s Canva connector to mechanically generate multiple personalized designs by prompting ChatGPT to take over your browser, navigate to Canva, and create custom variations of your templates.

Step-by-step:

1. Go to canva.com/ai and create a template (e.g., “congratulatory letter”) or select an existing design

2. In ChatGPT, click “+” → Agent Mode and connect your Canva account through Connectors

3. Prompt: “Find my [template name] in Canva and create 4 versions with custom messages for: Michael (bodybuilding win), Anna (recent baby), etc.”

4. ChatGPT duplicates your template and auto-fills personalized text for every recipient

5. Review in Canva and make quick formatting fixes before downloading

Pro tip: Generate all of your text variations in ChatGPT first, then use Canva AI for layouts. Agent Mode handles bulk automation, but expect some manual cleanup — treat it as a drafting assistant relatively than a one-click solution.

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• Full-stack AI training support across speech, vision, simulation, and agent workflows

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MICROSOFT

📊 Microsoft Excel gets an AI upgrade

The Rundown: Microsoft is testing a brand new COPILOT function that provides broader AI assistance directly into Excel cells, letting users generate summaries, classify data, and create tables using natural language prompts.

The main points:

• The COPILOT function integrates with existing formulas, with results mechanically updating as data changes.

• COPILOT is powered by OpenAI’s gpt-4.1-mini model, but cannot access external web data or company documents with inputs staying confidential.

• Microsoft cautioned against using it in high-stakes settings on account of potentially inaccurate results, with the feature also currently having limited call capability.

• The feature is rolling out to Microsoft 365 Beta Channel users, with a broader release for Frontier program web users dropping soon.

Why it matters: Thousands and thousands interact with Excel daily, and this system seems like certainly one of the few areas that has yet to see huge mainstream AI infusions that move the needle. It looks like that could be changing, with Microsoft and Google’s Sheets beginning to make broader moves to bring spreadsheets into the AI era.

QUICK HITS

🛠️ Trending AI Tools

• 🎆 Qwen-Image-Edit – Qwen’s recent image editing model

• 🎹 Eleven Music API – Integrate high-quality music into products & workflows

• 🧠 M3 Agent – ByteDance Seed’s multimodal agent with long-term memory

• 🤖 Nemotron Nano 2 – Nvidia’s family of tiny, efficient reasoning models

📰 Every part else in AI today

Google product lead Logan Kilpatrick posted a banana emoji on X, hinting that the ‘nano-banana’ photo editing model being tested on LM Arena is probably going from Google.

OpenAI announced the discharge of ChatGPT Go, a less expensive subscription specifically for India, priced at lower than $5 monthly and in a position to be paid in local currency.

ElevenLabs introduced Chat Mode, allowing users to construct text-only conversational agents on the platform along with voice-first systems.

DeepSeek launched its V3.1 model with a bigger context window, while Chinese media pinned delays of the R2 release on CEO Liang Wenfeng’s “perfectionism.”

Eight Sleep announced a brand new $100M raise, with plans to develop the world’s first “Sleep Agent” for proactive recovery and sleep optimization.

Runway launched a series of updates to its platform, including the addition of third-party models and visual upgrades to its Chat Mode.

LM Arena debuted BiomedArena, a brand new evaluation track for testing and rating the performance of LLMs on real-world biomedical research.

COMMUNITY

🤝 Community AI workflows

Every newsletter, we showcase how a reader is using AI to work smarter, save time, or make life easier.

Today’s workflow comes from reader Cleo M. in Miami, FL:

“I’m using Fal, Higgsfield, and ChatGPT for my AI Twin on Instagram. I actually have created a complete brand round her, and I’m selling digital affiliate programs passively, all with AI! I wouldn’t have this income stream without it. It runs itself while I’m at my real 9-5 job at an organization that won’t allow using AI! How ironic!”

How are you using AI in your work? Tell us here.

🎓 Highlights: News, Guides & Events

• Read our previous newsletter: Alibaba’s powerful recent image editor

• Today’s AI tool guide: Create and edit Canva designs with ChatGPT agents

• Watch our last live workshop: Mastering AI agents for customer support

See you soon,

Rowan, Joey, Zach, Shubham, and Jennifer — the humans behind The Rundown